Package: debian-policy Version: 3.5.6.1 Severity: normal After discussions with Randolph Chung, we've decided that it makes sense to begin to work toward making cdebconf a viable drop-in replacement for debconf on debian systems. The immediate problem, besides the various places cdebconf is lagging debconf, is that 221 packages declare verisoned dependencies on debconf.
A breakdown of these dependencies is that the ones depending on versions << 0.5 are probably relics due to ancient long-fixed bugs in very early versions of debconf, and the change to protocol version 2.0, and the renaming of the isdefault flag. The rest are probably too-tight dependncies, though some may be concientious tracking of recent debconf bugs I'm not remembering. Anyway, it looks like packages have few reasons to have versioned deps on debconf aside from changes to the debconf protocol, so if we introduce a virtual package debconf-2.0 which both debconf and cdebconf provide, most of these deps can be converted over to that, and cdebconf can begin to be installed on debian systems, without apt wanting to remove 200 packages. So I'm calling for a new virtual package to be added to the list. Note that the version number, which will be implemented, refers to the version of the debconf specification. I considered calling it debconf-protocol-2.0, but that is overlong, and the protocol is not the entirety of the spec. One concern is that I know that there are a few little things that are not specified clearly in the spec, in which debconf and cdebconf differ. An example would be debconf's special handling of reasking a question twice in the same run of a script. Until these differences are identified, and resolved in the spec or at least implemented the same in debconf and cdebconf, it may be best if packages use debconf | debconf-protocol-2.0 in their dependencies so that dselect et al will pick the currently more sane choice by default. -- System Information Debian Release: unstable Architecture: i386 Kernel: Linux kite 2.4.16 #1 Sat Dec 1 17:37:24 EST 2001 i686 Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C Versions of packages debian-policy depends on: ii fileutils 4.1-10 GNU file management utilities -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
